Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 7, 2025
For, as it happened, the flat fenland in which I so nearly sunk was the fenland round the Island of Athelney, which is now an island in the fields and no longer in the waters.
Earth, heaped and beaten hard, is the most enduring of things; the tumuli all over England have outlasted even the monoliths, and the great defensive mounds at Norwich and at Oxford are stronger and clearer cut than anything that the Middle Ages have left. This bank, which first made Fenland, still stands most conspicuous.
Farther northward in the Fenland, and over the border in Lincolnshire, was the Benedictine abbey of "courteous Crowland," though its remains are now scanty. It derives its name from the "Land of Crows," which in this part is drained by the Welland River and the great Bedford Level.
But if a poor man followed, as Tennyson says, "far as the wild swan wings to where the world dips down to sea and sands," Tennyson would scarcely allow him to catch it. If he found the wildest goose in the wildest fenland in the wildest regions of the sunset, he would very probably discover that the rich never sleep; and that there are no wild things in England.
But however much as an Englishman I might rejoice that the actual area of "our tight little island," which after all is not very tight, should not be diminishing, it would be a poor consolation to me, if I possessed land and houses on the coast of Norfolk which were fast slipping into the sea, to know that in the Fenland industrious farmers were adding to their acres.
Through the kitchen window, set opposite the door, could be seen a broad stretch of country of the fenland type, flat and bare, and intersected with dykes, where sedges stirred slightly in the southerly breeze. Here and there were pools of overflowed rivulets, and here and there were plantations of stunted hornbeam, the russet leaves of which still clung thickly to them.
It was all I needed, for once out of this fenland I knew the country well aye, every furlong of it but I was willing enough to let him guide me through land I knew, that if ever he were questioned as he might well be when my outlawry was known his tale of my little knowledge of the country would make men think me some stranger, and so no blame would come on him for harbouring me.
For the Crane and his rabble, flushed with easy conquest, kept ill watch, and the tongues of forest running down to the fenland made a good hunting ground for a wary forester. Jehan's pickets found Hugo of Auchy by the Sheen brook and brought back tidings. Thereupon a subtle plan was made.
I live, myself, for most of the year in a countryside that is often spoken of by its inhabitants as dull, tame, and featureless; yet I cannot say with what daily renewal of delight I wander in the pastoral Cambridge landscape, with its long low lines of wold, its whitewalled, straw-thatched villages embowered in orchards and elms, its slow willow-bound streams, its level fenland, with the far-seen cloud-banks looming overhead: or again in the high-ridged, well-wooded land of Sussex, where I often live, the pure lines of the distant downs seen over the richly coloured intervening weald grow daily more dear and intimate, and appeal more and more closely to the deepest secrets of sweetness and delight.
III. Hereward in England Having settled his affairs in Flanders, in due time he landed once more in the Wash with Torfrida and the child and two shiploads of stout fighters, with whom he went through Fenland raising an army.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking